Spies Against Armageddon by Dan Raviv Read Free Book Online Page B

trigger the regime’s downfall.
    The Mossad wanted to keep up the pressure, without all-out war. Pressure already included actions that many other nations’ intelligence services would never consider: smuggling Israelis into Iran, targeting individual Iranians for assassination, and in a multitude of ways violating the canons of international law.
    To a foreigner, many of these covert activities might have seemed outrageous. But to Israelis in the intelligence community, it all made a lot of sense—in particular, when the alternatives were either bombing Iran, or Iran having the bomb.
    Israel’s next moves could prove to be more momentous, risky, and potentially damaging than anything the country had faced since declaring independence in 1948.
    The actions taken against Iran, so far, bore the unique hallmarks of Israel’s espionage agencies. Intelligence gathering, sabotage, assassinations, psychological warfare—and other measures that were kept even more secretive—reflected the modes of operation that were designed, developed, and executed by Israeli security agencies over more than 60 years of trial, error, and success.
    The strategies and daring steps of today are rooted in a hidden history. The best way to understand the decisions now being made is to go back as far as 1948 and learn about the motivations and methods of the people inside Israeli intelligence.

Chapter Two
    Childhood Diseases
    “Dump him!” That was the order from Isser Harel, the undisputed czar of the Israeli intelligence community.
    Several Mossad operatives were sitting in a small office at Sde Dov airfield in northern Tel Aviv near the end of 1954. They were dead tired, having just landed after a four-hour flight in a shaky World War II-era plane. They wanted to go home to their families, but they had a problem. They had just unloaded a corpse, and they did not know what to do with it.
    It was the body of Avner Israel. His life, his death, and his disappearance illustrated how almost everything in the country’s first years had to be improvised. Whether with a traitor or a spycatcher, you made it up as you went along. Still, all through the history of Israeli intelligence, every failure, every improvised solution, and every stroke of luck was a building block in developing a uniquely successful style.
    As for the man whose family name was Israel, he was an immigrant from Bulgaria. In retrospect, his coming from a Communist country should have prompted some attention. Even more troubling should have been the fact that after surviving the Holocaust he moved to British-ruled Palestine for a while, returned to Bulgaria, and then arrived in Israel for good in 1949.
    The immigrant’s son—Moshe Tziper, himself a colorful character in a small rural community in the Galilee—recounted, more than six decades later, that his father had been married to a Christian woman back in the old country but divorced her. In Israel, he served in the navy and then transferred to the air force.
    He was stationed in the north and took part in the first Israeli efforts to develop EW—electronic warfare. This secret work included means of blinding enemies’ technology. Israel seemed talented and was promoted to the rank of captain.
    In 1953 he married another Jewish immigrant from Bulgaria. “That was my mother,” Tziper reminisced with distinctly mixed feelings. “But I know that my father was a philanderer and proved to be a crook.”
    The couple lived in Haifa, where Israel became romantically entangled with a female secretary at the Italian consulate. The romance seemed to drive him mentally over the edge. He converted to Roman Catholicism in a Jerusalem church and married the woman—without bothering with the bureaucratic niceties of divorcing his wife, Matilda. He did change his name to Alexander Ibor.
    Charges filed by the police accused him of pretending to own an apartment—it simply was not his—and selling it for cash to four different buyers.